Washington Irving Biography Quotes 39 Report mistakes

Early Life
Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783, in New York City, the youngest of a large family. His father, William Irving Sr., was a Scottish-born merchant; his mother, Sarah (Sanders) Irving, came from England. The bustling port and polyglot streets of post-Revolutionary New York formed his earliest landscape. Family stories long preserved an encounter with George Washington in 1789, when the new president was in New York; the child was introduced to the national hero whose name he bore, a symbolic benediction that later biographers liked to recall. From boyhood Irving devoured theater and travel books and taught himself to observe character and place with amused detachment, qualities that would become the signature of his prose.

Apprenticeship and First Publications
Irving studied law in New York, reading in the office of the eminent jurist Josiah Ogden Hoffman. He was admitted to the bar in 1806, but legal practice never fully engaged him. Even as a student, he had begun to publish light social satire under the persona Jonathan Oldstyle in his brother Peter Irving's newspaper, cultivating a playful, conversational voice modeled on Addison and Steele. This period fixed the pattern of his life: intermittent office work and family obligations punctuated by steady literary experiment.

Satire and the Knickerbocker Persona
In 1807, 1808 Irving joined with his brother William and their friend James Kirke Paulding to produce Salmagundi, a sprightly satirical miscellany that poked fun at New York fashions and politics. In those pages he popularized the name Gotham for the city, a joke that stuck. He followed with A History of New-York (1809), attributed to the crotchety Dutch antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose mock-scholarly voice became part of local folklore. The book's affectionate caricatures of old Dutch families and its whimsical footnotes established Irving as the city's most engaging humorist and gave New Yorkers the lasting nickname "Knickerbockers".

Loss, War, and Editorial Work
Irving's personal life was marked by grief when Matilda Hoffman, the daughter of his legal mentor and the young woman to whom he was devoted, died in 1809. He never married. During the War of 1812 he helped organize New York's defenses and later served on Governor Daniel D. Tompkins's staff. He also edited the Analectic Magazine, writing biographical sketches and reviews, including profiles of American naval officers that displayed a growing command of narrative prose.

Transatlantic Breakthrough
In 1815 Irving sailed to England to assist his brothers' Liverpool mercantile house. The firm collapsed three years later, forcing him to rely entirely on his pen. A network of literary friendships, notably with Sir Walter Scott and the poet Thomas Moore, helped him find his footing. Writing under the persona Geoffrey Crayon, he issued The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819, 1820. The collection, which included Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, was celebrated in Britain and America, giving Irving a rare transatlantic audience. He followed with Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824), refining the polished, gently ironic style that made him a household name.

Spain, Scholarship, and Diplomacy
Opportunities drew Irving to Spain in 1826, where he worked near the American legation and gained access to archival materials collected by historian Martin Fernandez de Navarrete. He wrote A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada (1829), and Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831), works that blended careful reading of sources with narrative flair. He also produced The Alhambra (1832), a mosaic of legends, sketches, and observations set in the Moorish palace at Granada. For a time he served in diplomatic posts in Madrid and then in London as secretary of the American legation, experience that broadened his contacts and reinforced his role as a cultural mediator between the United States and Europe.

Return to America and the West
Irving returned home in 1832 to public festivities and the warm welcome of friends such as the poet William Cullen Bryant and the diarist Philip Hone. Seeking new material, he journeyed beyond the settled East into the prairies, traveling with soldiers, traders, and government agents. A Tour on the Prairies (1835) presented scenes of the frontier to readers who knew the West mostly by rumor. At the request of the financier John Jacob Astor, Irving compiled Astoria (1836), a history of the fur-trading enterprise on the Pacific coast, followed by The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), drawn from the explorer's notes. These books expanded the imaginative geography of American letters at a time when James Fenimore Cooper and others were also reimagining national space.

Sunnyside and Literary Society
By the mid-1830s Irving had settled at Sunnyside, his picturesque home on the Hudson near Tarrytown, where he shaped a modest farmhouse into a Dutch-inspired retreat. There he maintained warm relations with fellow writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., corresponded on literary matters with friends in London, and welcomed visitors from abroad. When Charles Dickens toured the United States in 1842, the two authors met and expressed mutual admiration, a public sign of Irving's standing among English-speaking writers. His nephew Pierre M. Irving often assisted him and later became his biographer, preserving letters and recollections that form a major source for Irving's life.

Minister to Spain
Public service called again when President John Tyler appointed Irving United States minister to Spain in 1842. During his tenure in Madrid he handled routine diplomatic business at a sensitive moment in Spanish politics and international affairs, drawing on the tact he had cultivated over decades of transatlantic life. His presence also furthered informal cultural diplomacy, as he remained a genial advocate for American letters abroad. He returned to Sunnyside in 1846, eager to devote his remaining years to writing.

Final Works and Last Years
Late in life Irving turned to literary biography and history. He published a Life of Oliver Goldsmith and issued Mahomet and His Successors, works that balanced sympathy for their subjects with careful narration. His culminating project was the multivolume Life of George Washington (1855, 1859), researched over many years and completed only weeks before his death. The choice of subject echoed his childhood brush with the first president and allowed him to shape an accessible national narrative for a broad readership. Irving died at Sunnyside on November 28, 1859, and was laid to rest in the cemetery at Sleepy Hollow, not far from the landscape he had transformed into legend.

Legacy
Irving helped establish the short story as a respected form in American literature and showed that an American author could win and hold a transatlantic audience. His pseudonymous personae, from Diedrich Knickerbocker to Geoffrey Crayon, created a playful frame for blending travel sketch, folklore, and history. He stabilized place names and traditions in the American imagination: the drowsy hollows and Dutch hamlets of the Hudson Valley, the convivial English Christmas, the bustling "Gotham" of New York. As a writer among writers, he moved with ease from the salons of Sir Walter Scott to the parlors of William Cullen Bryant and the public dinners for Charles Dickens. As a professional man of letters, he modeled a career that others could emulate, navigating between art and livelihood, and as a diplomat he embodied, in modest form, the idea that literature could serve as a bridge across nations. His work remains a touchstone for the early national period and a testament to the power of graceful storytelling.

Our collection contains 39 quotes who is written by Washington, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Justice - Friendship - Love.

Other people realated to Washington: Herman Melville (Novelist), Claudette Colbert (Actress)